The process of “posting” a purchase order is vital to maintaining good financial integrity in your purchasing data. The act of “posting” a purchase order and its items will disable those transactions from numerous types of updates. For instance, neither the quantity nor the unit price of posted items may be modified. This is done to ensure that a PO that has been printed and delivered to a vendor is not subsequently modified. Clearly, having information recorded in your system that does not match information presented to vendor will cause confusion and reconciliation problems.
In addition, posting purchase order items makes them eligible for subsequent processing steps; namely, the entry of receiving information and the entry of invoicing information. Until an item is posted, neither the receiving nor the invoicing processing steps will be allowed by the system.
To Post a Purchase Order
To post a purchase order, navigate to the Purchase Order homepage and click on either “Unposted PO Header Listing” or “Unposted PO Item Listing.” Both links will take you to a list of POs.
Click the desired PO number on the results screen, which will pull up the PO detail screen.
Click the Action menu, click “Post PO,” and confirm the choice when prompted.
When done, click “Update” to save the changes.
After a posting operation, a significant number of fields are disabled, indicated by a gray background color. The posting operation “locks” these particular field values from further update. If, after posting, you determine that changes are required, there are several solutions:
- Cancel the PO
- Cancel one or more items
- Add additional items that will adjust the PO in a manner that will reflect a desired quantity and amount.